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The relation of the individual to his fantasy is very largely conditioned by his relation to the unconscious in general, and this in turn is conditioned in particular by the spirit of the age. According to the degree of rationalism that prevails, the individual will be more disposed or less to have dealings with the unconscious and its products. Christianity, like every closed system of religion, has an undoubted tendency to suppress the unconscious in the individual as much as possible, thus paralyzing his fantasy activity. Instead, religion offers stereotyped symbolic concepts that are meant to take the place of his unconscious once and for all. The symbolic concepts of all religions are recreations of unconscious processes in a typical, universally binding form. Religious teaching supplies, as it were, the final information about the “last things” and the world beyond human consciousness. Wherever we can observe a religion being born, we see how the doctrinal figures flow into the founder himself as revelations, in other words as concretizations of his unconscious fantasy. The forms welling up from his unconscious are declared to be universally valid and thus replace the individual fantasies of others. The evangelist Matthew has preserved for us a fragment of this process from the life of Christ: in the story of the temptation we see how the idea of kingship rises out of the founder’s unconscious in the visionary form of the devil, who offers him power over all the kingdoms of the earth. Had Christ misunderstood the fantasy and taken it concretely, there would have been one madman the more in the world. But he rejected the concretism of his fantasy and entered the world as a king to whom the kingdoms of heaven are subject. He was therefore no paranoiac, as the result also proved. The views advanced from time to time from the psychiatric side concerning the morbidity of Christ’s psychology are nothing but ludicrous rationalistic twaddle, with no comprehension whatever of the meaning of such processes in the history of mankind.
The form in which Christ presented the content of his unconscious to the world became accepted and was declared valid for all. Thereafter all individual fantasies became otiose and worthless, and were persecuted as heretical, as the fate of the Gnostic movement and of all later heresies testifies. The prophet Jeremiah is speaking just in this vein when he warns (ch. 23):
[82] Similarly, we see in early Christianity how the bishops zealously strove to stamp out the activity of the individual unconscious among the monks. The archbishop Athanasius of Alexandria in his biography of St. Anthony gives us particularly valuable insights in this respect. By way of instruction to his monks, he describes the apparitions and visions, the perils of the soul, which befall those that pray and fast in solitude. He warns them how cleverly the devil disguises himself in order to bring saintly men to their downfall. The devil is, of course, the voice of the anchorite’s own unconscious, in revolt against the forcible suppression of his nature.
-Why Kirby is Annoying
Thread starter fiberO4 Start date May 8, 2026
